The shooting in the Aurora, Colorado, movie theater has incited the usual debate over guns. One side says tighter gun restrictions could have prevented the horrible incident that night. The other responds that more guns in the hands of law-abiding people might have prevented it.

It should finally have dawned on the American people that the politicians who presume to guide the economy have no bloody idea what they’re doing. We’re long past the time when knowledge of economics was required to see that the government is impotent when it comes to creating economic recovery. If you want evidence of that impotence, just look around.

“I don’t know if America has a leadership problem; it certainly has a followership problem,” New York Times columnist David Brooks laments. “Vast majorities of Americans don’t trust their institutions.” I think Brooks is wrong, though I wish he were right.

Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion regarding the constitutionality of ObamaCare holds that the penalty for not complying with the mandate is both a tax and not a tax — depending on the question. If the question is whether someone may sue to strike down the mandate, the court says yes, because the penalty is not a tax. However, The government argued that should the Commerce Clause argument fail, the court can think of the mandate penalty as — wait for it — a tax! 

Watching the television pundits fret over campaign finance is amusing, because the solution to their problem is right under their noses. They just don’t want to see it.

As long as government has the power to sell privileges, people will spend big bucks to influence elections. The wealthy and well connected will always have better access to government than regular people.

The debate incited by Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to outlaw supersized sodas in New York misses an important point. In the mayor’s words, “We’re not taking away anybody’s right to do things. We’re simply forcing you to understand that you have to make the conscious decision to go from one cup to another cup.” (Emphasis added.)
 
There it is. He wants to forcibly interfere with other people in order to achieve his objective.

We should be grateful that the Obama administration seems disinclined to intervene militarily in Syria. But let’s note that the administration has not kept hands off. In a variety of ways, it is already aiding the rebels. Moreover, White House spokesman Jay Carney says that all options — even military intervention — are on the table.

Presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is essentially playing one card in his quest for Barack Obama’s job: his business experience taught him how economies work.
 
But Romney’s own pitch raises doubts about this.

It’s widely believed that JPMorgan Chase’s recent $2 billion–plus loss proves we need the comprehensive banking regulation called for by the 2010 Dodd-Frank law. Not only is that belief wrong, but the only way to minimize systemic damage from banking without stifling productive innovation is to end all guarantees and all barriers to competition.

The partisan squabbling over the killing of Osama bin Laden is a typical election-year distraction, effectively squelching discussion of more important matters one year after the execution of the al-Qaeda chief executive. While the commentators are engaged in trivialities, big foreign-policy questions are ignored.